Newscred CEO: The World Will Let You Know When Your Product Is Right

Few companies grow exactly as their founders expect them to. That
was certainly the case for Shafqat Islam and NewsCred. After leaving Merril
Lynch, Islam, an engineer by training, started the company as a
consumer facing news site.

Realizing that tools for publishers to syndicate and license
content were inefficient and painful, they changed their business
and started to create better tools. Now, they've built a fully
formed, syndication platform, licensing content from over 1,500
sources, including The Economist and Bloomberg.
(Full disclosure: Business
Insider is a NewsCred customer)

Now, just a few years later,
that pivot's paid off tremendously. Because they had so much
content, and made it so accessible, they were in a perfect
position to serve companies that use content for marketing, for
emails, and for their consumer facing websites.

The company's become
increasingly dominant in content marketing, a rapidly growing
business that barely existed when they started. They now do more
business with consumer brands and companies than they do with
publishers, including global giants like Pepsi and Orange
Telecom.

They were in the right place
and the right time, and the market came calling.

From a big pivot to
rapid growth

It's been a wild ride, Islam says. "If you just look
at 2012 that's a pretty good indicator of how fast
we're growing. We were a handful of people in New York, now we
have 75 people in 3 office. Our revenue has gone up about eleven
and a half time over the course of a year."

The rise of their customer base has been extremely rapid as well.
They saw 570 percent growth last year.

It all goes to show that you rarely end up in the business you
think you will. It's not always a fully formed and brilliant
initial idea that gets rewarded, but rather patience, the ability
to adapt, and being in the right place at the right time. The
company wouldn't be in the position it was now if it hadn't been
so diligent and so patient in building its content partnerships
and technology.

"We had nearly 12X revenue
growth last year, but that was about 3 and a half years after the
founding of the company," Islam says. "You have to be extremely patient and
extremely meticulous about the fundamentals of the company, about
building out the core assets."

The best products are
the ones the market pulls out of you

You really know you have the right product, the one that can
propel you to the next level, when the market starts to demand it
from you, rather than facing a constant to convince the world it
needs it. "It wasn't a deliberate thing that we
predicted four years ago that content marketing would emerge like
it has," Islam says.

"There's a great quote from
Marc
Andreessen that perfectly sums it up, Islam says. "He said
that 'In a great market — a market with lots of
real potential customers -- the market pulls product out of the
startup.'"

Islam and his team didn't have
a sudden realization that their product was perfect for brands,
the market just came calling.

And once you get the product right, that's when the growth
really starts. That takes as much discipline as getting through
the tough early years. Last year, NewsCred acquired DayLife,
in a move Islam generally wouldn't recommend.

"The main tip I would give is that startups really shouldn't be
buying other startups," Islam says. "It's not a good idea. In
this case, it was such a good synergistic fit in terms of the
product base that we decided to go ahead with it."

He wouldn't have done it if the fit hadn't been so great. But
something that's as important as the fit is bringing the two
companies together afterwards.

"That's not easy for a startup to execute," Islam says.
"If you are going to do it you
have to be extremely disciplined about the post acquisition
period, integrating their people, infrastructure, and
the technology
stack."

Keeping a startup
culture intact

And as a company grows, they have to be more, not less focused on
keeping the culture that makes them unique.

"Probably the number one thing is to hire well, and hire using
the right criteria," Islam says. "Any role that we hire for, this might sound
trite, but its important to not get seduced by things on resume.
We hire for culture first. Will we get along? Can they play hard
and work hard?"

And more than that, they have
to have a real and tangible passion for the company's overall
goal, which is to help the media industry and journalism survive
and thrive by building new ways for content to be used and
shared.

But you know when you get the culture right, Islam says. He works
extremely hard, but as a founder, "it shouldn't ever feel
like a job, I feel like paid to hang out with my friends," he
says.

Something that also helped was the fact that Islam "had a
job before joining a startup." He spent 6 years at Merrill
Lynch working on big technology projects, which gave him
experience running big teams and big budgets.

When you get funding and have a bunch of money in the bank
account, it "gets pretty easy to spend a lot," Islam says. It's
important to know how to be disciplined.

Islam has a positive outlook for his business, and an ambitious
plan for the company. "My view
is that we're just scratching the surface when it comes to
content marketing."

His goal for the next few years
is to "transform Fortune 500 companies," and grow from hundreds
of customers to thousands.

"We're fortunate that we're the leaders here," Islam says. "We're
going to run as fast as possible to continue to lead the market."